Adaptation
Despite common belief there is no coherent, clearly established
adaptation theory. In fact according to Leitch there are rather what one could
call “adaptations” than “adaptation”. Lacking ‘‘a presiding poetics’’ (Robert B. Ray qtd. in
Leitch 149), the field is largely dominated by works on how a particular novel
or piece of literature is adapted in film. Studies on how particular literary
texts were adapted for cinematic purposes greatly outnumber any general
considerations on what entails adapting a text from one medium to another.
Corinne Lhermitte, in her article “A Jakobsonian Approach to Film Adaptations of
Hugo’s Les Misérables”, argues
that adaptation is a rewriting, a retelling of a story, yet not a mere
copy, but a story in itself. There is a fine line separating literary
adaptation from plagiarism, even when the screenplay barely resembles the
initial plot. Nevertheless, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes,
Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida claim that is very hard to define the notion of
originality. Not to mention the fact that Shakespeare has been adapting all the time, he
has no single original plot.
James M. Welsh, in
Introduction:
Issues of Screen Adaptation: What Is Truth, admits
that adaptation has always been central to the process of filmmaking, but
underlines that film
adaptations continue to be evaluated in terms of fidelity to the original source, usually
leading to the notion that “the book was better.” Adaptations are regarded as the unfaithful translations mostly
because of the impoverishment of the book’s content due to necessary omissions
in the plot and the inability of the filmmakers to read out and represent the
deeper meanings of the text (Marciniak 59). However,
there is consensus in the present among the critics that film has a separate
identity and separate aesthetic principles. According to Bluestone and by Siegfried Kracauer’s
roughly contemporaneous Theory of Film, “differences between literary
and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their respective
media” (qtd. in Leitch 150). Kracauer argues in his study that each medium has
a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while
obstructing others.’
In 1992, in an article titled “Film
(Adaptation) as Translation: Some Methodological Proposals”, Patrick Cattrysse
claims that cinematic adaptation is similar to the process of translation,
especially the intersemiotic one. The words are reconfigured into sound, music
and image. However, in the hierarchy of signs, the written word still holds the
authority, thus the movie becomes derivative, a simulacrum.
Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as a repetition with a difference,
insisting on its intertextuality feature, on the dialogue between the
original and its adaptations. Adaptation can be connected to the
post-modern culture of recycling but also with the post-Romantic myth of the
creator. According to the same author adaptation is at the same time imitation
and emulation because it pays tribute to the original and it is even
a way of learning, and what better way of learning than imitating the great
authorities. In fact some theorists such as Günter Kress have gone as afar as
stating that adaptation is the best way of learning because it comes with
something creative. Thus, by adapting the learner becomes a maker of signs, not
only a reader.
There is however a distinction between slave imitation and creative
imitation and that distinction can be expressed in terms of aura. As long as an
adaptation is creative, it may have an aura; mere copies do not have the
original’s aura.
We are still under the rule of the written word. Literature is
perceived as higher culture while film adaptations for example not only that
are seen as copies but they are also regarded as low, popular culture. As
Leitch states it ‘‘literature’’ carries an honorific charge ‘‘cinema’’ does
not. Since even the term ‘‘classic cinema’’ is a long way from having the same
implication as ‘‘literary classic,’’ written texts themselves, unlike films,
would seem to fall into two distinct orders, and any film that sought to adapt
a work of literature could only hope to fall into a category of films that does
not yet have a name (154-155).
Nowadays, however, when young people tend to read less classic
literature, film adaptations, through their appeal to a larger audience, may be
the afterlife of golden writings, saving the original from oblivion. Globalization
has made possible the making of a Chinese Hamlet Feng Xiaogang’s 2006 The Banquet(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgoQ6PDxihY),
in which actors’ performance and dance translate the characters’ emotions -, a
comic Hamlet in Branagh’s A Midwinter’s
Tale (UK, 1996 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBS92ui_h74)
or even an animated Hamlet in Disney’s production The Lion King (1996 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sj1MT05lAA).
This can be referred to as “the snowball effect”, as Mary L.
Ryan calls it: “a certain story enjoys so much popularity, or becomes culturally
prominent, that it spontaneously generates a variety of prequels, sequels,
fanfiction or transmedial adaptations.” As Kidnie Jane suggests, these
adaptations should be appreciated on their own because they show that any work
is a work in progress, still being constructed in several places and in time.
Movie adaptations are acquiring more and more autonomy from the text nowadays.
As the story is remediated, it tends to come closer to the reader if time and
space are taken as reference points, but it is also aspatial and atemporal as
transposition takes place with every remediation. We can no longer talk about
an author within certain geographical and historical limits. This is how one
single world generates many texts such as adaptations or multiple performances.
As Mary L. Ryan notices, the story world is no longer linked to the storyteller
or to the audience, but also to the contextual relationships while the text is
the outcome of these connections.
Lubomir Dolezel,
one of the founders of the fictional world theory, identified three ways how
one fictional world can be linked to another one: expansion (expanding the
original plot), modification (constructing different versions of the
protoworld) and transposition (moving the story in a different setting). For
these changes to take place there is the need for a fixed and stable centre on
which to reconstruct. In the case of adaptations after Shakespeare, what is
usually kept is the plot and the relationships between the characters. It is
not necessarily that language the one that gets translated, but often the
images are the ones that get remediated to such extent that some of the movies
do not even state that they are based on Shakespeare. This can be seen as a
claim for legitimacy on behalf of the adaptation which involves: attention to
context, deployment of history, gendered critique and a distinction between the
various cultural perspectives, as Burnett suggests when discussing particularly
Shakespeare and the world cinema. Using these techniques, the adaptation is
supposed to make the reader relate even more to the story world than the
adapted text did.
If Hamlet
or any other of Shakespeare’s plays is taken as a reference point, it is clear
how cinema adaptations were empowered into offering a reinterpretation of the
original text. For example, Zefirelli’s version of Hamlet
focuses not so much on the tragedy, but on the mechanisms that generate
it. On the other hand, Omkara
focuses on the political rivalries in India, while Michael
Almereyda's 2000 modernisation, is interested in typical
American racial relationships, is translated into a modern language and is also notable for
including elements of modern technology like the murdered king’s ghost first
appearing on a closed-circuit TV.
Works Cited:
Burnett, Mark. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012;
Cattrysse, Patrick. “Film (Adaptation) as
Translation: Some Methodological Proposals.” Target 4: 1. (1992): 53-70.;
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated, 2006
Chap. 1;
Kidnie, Jane M. Shakespeare and the Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routedge,
2009. Print;
Kress, Gunther R. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003.
Print;
Leitch, Thomas M. "Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation
Theory." Criticism. Number 2. Vol. 45. Detroit:
Published by Wayne
State UP, 2003. 149-71.
Print;
Lhermitte, Corinne. “A
Jakobsonian Approach to Film Adaptations of Hugo’s Les Misérables”, in Nebula, 2.1,
March 2005;
Ryan, Mary L. Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality in
International Journal of Communication No. 3, 2009. 586-606. Print.
Welsh, James M. Introduction: Issues of
Screen Adaptation: What Is Truth in The
Literature/Film Reader Issues of Adaptation. The Scarecrow Press. Lanham,
Maryland • Toronto
• Plymouth, UK 2007
CONTRIBUTORS:
Croitoru Corina-Adriana, American Studies MA, 2nd year
Monica Andreea Georgescu, American Studies MA, 2nd year
Alexandra Maria Ciobotaru, American Studies MA, 2nd year
